My beginner's luck with the Adafruit Trinket seems to have run out. Out of eight purchased, five are non-functional, some right out of the box. Adafruit provides software to reprogram (reset) the bootloader, which functions as the Trinket's operating system, but it's erroring out. No luck on the search engines.
I came up bust on the forums, but noticed in a few cases, the "admin" account had suggested emailing their support address. So I fired off a detailed description of my problem, what I had done, and a screenshot of the error message itself. Like y'do when you've spent two years in tech. support yourself.
To their credit, Adafruit had a reply within a few hours. But it was a request to ask the question on the forums.
At first I was annoyed because 1.) That's sort of like pushing their product support support off onto the community, and 2.) I need another one-off login like I need the bubonic plague.
But, on second read, any useful reply would only solve the problem for me. Arduino is an open source platform, and walling off useful information runs 180 degrees counter to that ethos. Also, open source would not exist in any robust form without the means to broadcast information at almost zero cost--i.e. over a widely accessible internet.
Thus, I have to confess some chagrin at my earlier selfish instincts. In this case, information should, in fact, be free*
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* For a background on the (in)famous quote, see Fortune's 2009 interview with Stewart Brand.
